Mark McKinnon

America's commitment to religious freedom and tolerance should not be conditional.

I'll tell you, Liz Cheney is going to be a very good candidate. I worked with her during the Bush campaigns. She's smart, she's focused, she's disciplined - and she's got a great back story. She's got a large family. She's a great mom. And she's a hard worker. I think she's going to be a very effective campaigner.

Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.

Politics only makes the difficult challenge of marriage even harder, with the demands of the job and the public spotlight it casts on a union.

You know, Republicans should have a consistent philosophy. And if your philosophy is about limited government and not intruding in people's lives, you shouldn't just inconveniently take a social issue like gay marriage and say, 'Well, unless we think - actually we should be intruding your life.'

I don't really care how or why Obama got to the right place on gay marriage. I'm just glad he got there.

The problem with State of the Union speeches is that they are, by their nature and design, alphabet soup. It's hard to know what a president really cares about when they run down a laundry list and check every issue box under the sun for fear they will offend some constituency if they don't.

America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.

It's much more powerful and compelling to create a positive vision than it is to tear somebody down.

Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum.

Washington doesn't have just a spending problem, or just an entitlement problem, or just a taxing problem. We have a leadership problem. Fix that, and the first three problems are solved.

Technology and social media have brought power back to the people.

Contrary to conventional military and game theory, the most effective offense is sometimes a direct attack against your political opponent's greatest strength - not his weaknesses - to place him immediately on the defensive.

Every day I am being told to sign up for Tumblr, Yammer, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Last.fm, ping.fm or the hot social-media tool du jour that happened to get mentioned on Mashable.com. It is like a social-media arms race. Each one of these new tools is like a cool new night club. Hot today, gone tomorrow, replaced with something else.

A failure to act is a terrible, stunning legacy for any leader. But far worse when it is the president of the United States. And that's the point driven home by Romney's selection of Ryan, who dared to lead when Obama did not.

As history has repeatedly proven, one trade tariff begets another, then another - until you've got a full-blown trade war. No one ever wins, and consumers always get screwed.

There's only one way we're going to change our political climate and ensure we establish some respect in our discourse. And that is to show there is a real price to pay for being a disrespectful partisan idiot.